The course looks at the representation of Italian-Americans in American cinema. We will study the history of this representation from The Black Hand (1906), through superstar Rodolfo Valentino's 1920's racial melodramas, the early 1930's gangster movies, the family melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, and into the 1990s and 2000s, with filmic and televisual off-springs of The Godfather (1972) such as Goodfellas (1990), The Sopranos (1999-2007), and The Jersey Shore (2009-2013). Rather than simply being a “film class,” this will be a course on visual culture. We will examine such cinematic issues as racial and gender typecasting, racial mimesis, the role of melodrama, and the implications of "racialization" in light of broader convergences between identity politics and popular culture.